Wednesday, December 31, 2014

For South African figurative
artist Marlene Dumas the ghosts of
her childhood Linger in her paintings with their restricted palette and portraits
devoid of personality. About which she has written “I use second-hand images
and first-hand emotions.”

Dumas grew up as part of the privileged
class in apartheid South Africa where racism had been institutionalized and
censorship was used to stabilize the regime. It was not until the early 1970’s,
whilst at art school in Cape Town that the first cracks in this façade began to
appear.

Attending a screening of Alain Resnais enigmatic
love story Last Year
in Marienbad left her perplexed, wondering why painting wasn’t as
experimental. As she has said “I was totally perplexed. But I
felt it was important to see how the film broke down the narrative structures,
while there was still somehow a love story in it. So you could have the
politics and the love story and a reflection on the medium.”

At the
age of 23, a scholarship in the Netherlands showed her that painting was addressing
these issues. Dumas also discovered modern and contemporary art, saw for the
first time European classical art in the flesh rather than as reproductions along
with un-censored news photographs
and X-rated magazines. She also started to build her archive of newspaper and
magazine photos which along with her own Polaroid’s are the source material for
her paintings.

Painting from
photographs liberates Dumas from being beholden to the subject; she can alter
the composition to suit the painting’s needs. “People just want to explain everything in relation to
that image,” she lamented to the New York Times’ Claire Messud, “all the better
paintings should be something else.” “It’s
not really a young girl,” she explained, “It’s more an allegory.”

A point Dumas underscores
with her titles which often shock and/or
exhilarate and are imbued with a dark humor. As the curator of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Helen Molesworth
explains “I don’t think people always get the humor, because she’s working out
of that dark Northern tradition of bawdy gallows humor. Every punchline is,
‘And then you die!’ ”

The
retrospective exhibition Marlene Dumas:
The Image as Burden is currently on show at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum until the 4th
of January. In February 2015 it will open at London’s Tate
Modern followed by showing at Basel’s Fondation
Beyeler from the end of May to mid September.

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

The Spanish, 20th
Century master, Pablo Picasso said “Art is a
lie that makes us realize truth.” The controversial and
prolific Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki is an embodiment of this sentiment through his perpetual focus on everyday life. As he has said “Photography is a secondary thing, because
actual objects are true and photography is a lie and a merely a copy of
reality.”

This reality seems to suggest that
life is the meaning of life with sexuality being its underlying motive which
shocks western audiences but has the ring of truth for the Japanese. As the Tate’s
curator of photography, Simon Baker,
told the Guardian newspaper "It's about the double standard associated
with Japanese culture. It's an
incredibly polite, formal society on the surface, [but it] has this hidden
underside of sexuality. Araki very effectively works on this relationship."

With over 450 books to his credit,
one of his early publications Sentimental
Journey is a photo essay of his 1971 honeymoon
with his wife, Yoko, about which Araki has
said “As to my honeymoon, I started taking photographs right away, beginning
with our train ride, and then having sex. That is what everyone does on a
honeymoon, so it is nothing special.”

This matter of fact approach along
with an ability to relate to his models, often intimately, has allowed Araki to
create a body of work that underscores his credo "life
is itself photography."

A camera is Araki’s constant
companion although he allows others to take the shot and from time to time he
is a part of the picture. But claims the credit for himself, which rationalizes
saying “the camera has the authorship, not
the photographer. And I own the camera!

Hong Kong’s Aishonanzuka
Gallery is currently exhibiting a selection of Araki’s photographs. Theater of Love is on show until
the 17th of January, although the gallery is closed from the 25th
of December to the 6th of January.

Monday, December 29, 2014

The Syrian-Kuwait artist and poet Shurooq Amin has, through her art, become
the porpoise of the Middle East challenging the Islamists on their home turf. For as she has said “I address issues that move me or anger
me with a sense of injustice in some way: love in the Muslim world, child
marriages, gender issues, homosexuality, subjective censorship, political
stagnation, etc. I feel that it is a huge responsibility for me to tackle these
issues and open a dialogue in society with the hope of instigating social
change.”

She came to
international attention in 2012 when her show “It’s a Man’s World” was closed by the Kuwaiti authorities three
hours after opening to the public. It’s a
Man’s World was a follow up exhibition to her 2010 exhibitionSociety Girls; a pair of
exhibitions which explored gender disparities within Arab society.

Citing the pornographic and anti-Islamic nature of the work as
reasons for closing “It’s a Man’s World”, the authorities made Amin a cause célèbre for freedom of
expression advocates. As Amin told Sampsonia Way “In the past, I've had Islamists come to my show in anger
and huff-and-puff a little, but this is the first time they've blown my house
down, so to speak.”

Social media around the world sprang
to her defense including a
trending hashtag on Twitter, messages of support on Facebook and
thousands of supportive emails. Amin’s local, real world contemporaries had a
mixed reaction to the incident with many condemned her. About this reaction
Amin told the World
Policy Blog “Their logic was that I opened Pandora's Box for them!
They wanted to “let sleeping dogs lie,” as opposed to broadening minds and
enlightening generations and making a difference in society.”

Since then Amin
has had two solo exhibitions in Dubai. Popcornographic in 2013 which dealt with issues that are considered
taboo in the Middle East whilst We'll
Build This City on Art and Love explores issues related to “re-building
cities, minds, and beliefs that have been destroyed / deconstructed due to
corruption and dogmatic, hypocritical ideologies.”

For as Amin says “In
the Middle East, there are unspoken rules that order us to lie and hide our
true identity, because our society doesn't condone individuality—it condones
conformity.”

We'll Build
This City on Art and Love is currently on show at Ayyam’s London gallery until the 10th of January.

Sunday, December 28, 2014

Most people when they realize a camera is pointed in their
direction put on their photo face, strike the pose they believe represents
their persona. It is the kiss of death for the Street photographer. The fleeting
moment the photographer saw that prompted the shot has been subverted by the
subject.

The American, quasi-French street photographer Vivian Maier had the perfect cover in
the best John le Carré
tradition. Who would suspect the non-descript woman with a couple of kids in
tow was a strett photographer? Was that a camera hanging around her neck? Such was Maier’s mode of
operation.

A
nanny for most of her adult life, Maier would take her charges on long walks, often in the seedier parts of town. They were well aware these walks were not really
for their benefit but to take photographs. As one of her “children”, Sarah Ludington, nee Matthews, recalls "I liked the walks.
By the end, I would be in pain. We were walking probably 10 miles which when
you're little is a long way, but often she would take us to the beach at the
end." Her brother John adds “I always got the feeling that what she
wanted to do was take photos and hauling the kids around was just a chore."

A loner, Maier has been described by those who
crossed per path as uncompromising yet playful, curious yet intensely private,
and aloof to the point of callousness, even cruelty. To which could be added confident as
the over 100,000 undeveloped negatives discovered upon her death attest. She
felt no need to check the results of her days exploits. Or, perhaps, she just
didn’t care, being a part of the unforgiving moment was enough for her.

But the quality of
the work Maier bequeathed to the future would suggest otherwise. Her
photographs are good, very good indeed and she was aware that they couldn’t really
be changed after the fact. Like all great artists a sixth sense told her if she
had captured her vision.

A retrospective exhbition of her work Vivian Maier - Street Photographer is currently on show at Amsterdam's Foam Photography Museum until the 1st of February.

Saturday, December 27, 2014

The Spanish artist Francisco Goya
holds the distinction of being considered the last “old master” in the romantic
tradition and the first modern master who had a profound influence on the likes
of Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon. Whilst being a celebrated 18th
Century court painter commissioned to immortalize the rich and famous of his
day, Goya also had a major interest in the here and now that far exceeded his
interest in the world to come.

The epitome of the country boy who
made good in the city his portraits often included social comments not only about
the vanity of his subjects but also the position they held in the society over
which they ruled. But such was the skill of his craft these potentially
subversive tendencies were overlooked. As King Ferdinand VII of Spain is
reported to have told Goya after the war with France “You deserve to be
garroted, but you are a great artist so we forgive you."

In his late 40’s Goya became deaf
and his work became much darker. He continued as a court painter but also
produced experimental etchings of witches, ghosts and fantastic creatures. The
onset of the French invasion of Spain when Goya was in his 60’s saw him cement himself
into the modernist canon with its depictions of the atrocities he witnessed.

His lantern that illuminates the Third
of May became the bare bulb of Picasso’s Guernica which shone a light onto the
human suffering, without the grand heroics, that war entails and that all who
follow would emulate.

His final suite of paintings,
mostly on the walls of a farm house he bought outside Madrid, known as the “Black
Paintings,” are macabre depictions of the human condition. In one of the best
known the father devours his young; perhaps the ultimate description from a man
who had seen too much and forgotten too little.

A current exhibition of his works Goya: Order and Disorder is on show at the Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston until the 19th of January.

Friday, December 26, 2014

“I've always liked how popular music can walk a fine line between
sentimentality and profundity, in ways that visual art rarely finds an
equivalent for.”

Anne Collier

Photographs are essentially documentation; here is an object
and this is what it looks like. The context in which it is placed infuses the
portrayed image with additional meaning that in most cases for the images surrounding
our daily lives includes a sales pitch. A sunset to sell a holiday, an artistic
nude to sell a camera or the glamorous lifestyle associated with the latest
consumer goods be it a condo or a pair of jeans.

American photographer Anne Collier utilizing the clarity of
hindsight de-contextualizes mass media and popular
culture images from of the 1960s, 1970s, and
1980s. Employing a dead-pan aesthetic of a white and /or black
background she photographs photos. ”Like the white cube gallery space, these
visual devices serve to distance individual objects from their original
circumstances or context, creating a space that is somehow both specific and
ambiguous,” she has said.

The New York Times, Karen Rosenberg wrote
in 2012 "Anne Collier’s photographs of vintage books, album covers,
posters and other ephemera, taken in an antiseptic white studio, look
studiously detached at first. But after some time they reveal themselves as
sensitive and involved responses to an earlier generation’s visual culture."

Presented in a
still life format with often a ‘lived in’ feel, Collier’s meticulously arranged compositions reveal her
interest in the history of photography as an art medium along with an intellectual
inquiry into its meanings.

As she told Nottingham Contemporary’s Alex Farquharson “I’m interested in depicting different manifestations of
photographic imagery: how photography is employed in relation to everyday
objects such as magazines, record sleeves, posters, etc., and how these
mass-circulated things can absorb – and illuminate - our own narratives.”

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

“ it is the artifice of the pose and the act of looking that
interests me”

Janet Werner

Canadian artist Janet Werner
predominately paints the feminine; utilizing the genre of portraiture she
presents a cast of characters that are all fictional. Using fashion magazines, popular culture, naive paintings and
photography as source material, Werner’s women appear to be in a state of
transition. “Something is happening. Or something is appearing to them or they
look like they’re seeing something,” she has said.

Werner’s paintings are constructed
images, a head from here, a dress from there; these mixtures from her sources
are to a degree selfies. “I believe the work has a lot to do with my
subjectivity because it’s the one that I understand the most and it’s also the
one that I see reflected in culture the most. Images of women are everywhere,”
she says.

From magazines
to billboards the desire these images project informs her painting. Although
presented as portraits they are not intended to convey an individual’s likeness.
Writing about her work, Werner said, “The paintings reframe the problematics of
desire, using the mechanisms of melodrama, recontextualization, scale change,
and shifts of color to pose questions about these images and to test the limits
of their intended meanings.”

As James Patten, the director and chief curator ofWestern Univerity'sMcIntosh
Gallery, which hosted Werner's touring exhibition Another Perfect Day during October, says,“That’s where art is
really successful. It’s not a polemic telling you what is right or wrong but
getting you to consider the issues and to think about your own life in
relationship to them.”

Werner’s next exhibition Drop, Drop Slow Tears will be on show at
Montréal’s Parisian Laundry Gallery from the 15th of January
to the 14th of February next year.

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

These words uttered by the first man to walk on the moon in 1969 commemorate a unique moment in human history. As one of the seven artists invited by NASA
to document the Apollo 11 mission, Robert Rauschenberg’s impressions of the event combine the
wonder and trepidation experienced by the 450 million people worldwide who
watched the event unfold.

Rauschenberg had a
reputation for the innovative use of materials and methods from his earlier “Combine”
works, a pivotal series that paved the way from Abstract Expressionism to the
later movements of Pop and Conceptual art. About the Combine works he claimed
he “wanted something other than
what I could make myself and I wanted to use the surprise and the
collectiveness and the generosity of finding surprises. And if it wasn't a
surprise at first, by the time I got through with it, it was. So the object
itself was changed by its context and therefore it became a new thing."

The resultant Stoned
Moon Seriesof 34lithographs along with 19 drawings and collages
that came from the Apollo 11 commission are a mash up of images from NASA's archives with
photographs from various media outlets and his own work. For
Rauschenberg the potential collaboration between man and technology offered by
the space program was a glimmer of hope in the turbulent 1960’s. “The whole project seemed one of the only
things at that time that was not concerned with war and destruction,” he has said.

Twenty years later he set up the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation
to perpetrate his philosophy that art can change the world. Apart from ensuring access to his work and providing
residencies for emerging and established artists the Foundation creates
philanthropic initiatives that connect art, culture and creativity with
important issues such as education and climate change.

Rauschenberg’s Stoned
Moon Series is currently on show at the Cantor Arts
Center until the 16th of March next year.

Monday, December 22, 2014

In 1992 Art Spiegelman was
awarded a Pulitzer Prize under
the Special Awards and Citations – Letters
category for his comic strip Maus. An Anthropomorphic rendering of his families
experiences of the Holocaust with the Jews represented as mice and the Nazis as
cats. As the first comic book to be given such a distinction the name Graphic
Novel was coined to celebrate the elevated status.

It’s an appellation Spiegelman is not all that crazy about. “I’m called the father of the modern graphic novel.
If that’s true, I want a blood test,” he has said. “’Graphic novel’ sounds more
respectable, but I prefer ‘comics’ because it credits the medium. [‘Comics’] is
a dumb word, but that’s what they are.”

Spiegelman grew up on a diet of Mad Magazine comics, a genre
that still enthuses him today. “ I would say,TheSimpsons,TheDaily
Show,Colbertare
among the healthiest aspects of American culture right now. And they have to do
with carrying the genuine legacies of the earliestMads forward,”
he told the Tablet magazine’s David Samuels.

In the mid 1960’s whilst studying at Harpur College he freelanced for Topps Chewing Gum company
designing trading cards. In
the 1970’s Spiegelman moved to the American west coast and joined
the counter cultural underground
comix movement making a range of NSFW strips. At the end of the decade he
began teaching at New York’sSchool
of Visual Arts, a gig
that lasted nine years. In association with his wife, Françoise Mouly, he also produced the publication Raw which provided an outlet for new and foreign
cartoonists.

Spiegelman also created the Garbage Pail Kids series, a parody oftheCabbage
Patch Kidsdolls. About which says “A lot of people are imprinted with them, and it made a
difference. I thought of it very consciously as taking myMadlessons and passing them along dutifully to the next
generation.”

After the success of Maus,
Spiegelman joined The New Yorker and for a decade provided the weekly magazine
with memorable and often controversial covers. But the shadow of Manus continued
to loom large.

Turning super heroes in
brightly colored tights and Sunday chuckles into a masterpiece of 20th
Century art is an achievement Spiegelman can’t avoid. As he says, “What am I going to do? Say I wish I didn’t makeMaus? That’s just not true. And on the other hand, do
I want to have it dogging my steps everywhere? I’m going to say I’m lucky that
it does, because it allows me to enter one folly after another and still make
royalties from something else.”

Currently a retrospective
exhibition of Spiegelman’s work is on show at the Art Gallery of Ontario
until the 15th of March.Art Spiegelman's CO-MIX: A Retrospective was created by Paris’Galerie Martel, had a showing at New York’s Jewish
Museum before coming to Toronto.

Sunday, December 21, 2014

Narcissism it would seem is an occupational hazard for artists, from
Edvard Munch to Egon Schiele from Van Gogh to Matisse, all have indulged. For as
Australian artist Rick
Amor said“The artist paints self portraits
because the model is always there – and free.”

Rebadged in the 21st
Century as “selfies” they have become one of social media’s staples. And New
York artist Jeanette Hayes has adopted this phenomenon as her own. As she quipped
in an interview with The Paper’s Carlos Santolalla,
“Warhol and Picasso would have been
excellent with social media. I bet Rembrandt would have loved taking
selfies. He painted tons of self portraits. But these artists didn't have it,
and I do, so I'll take enough selfies for all of us.”

She got her
first i-phone when she was 17 and reportedly checks it every 15 minutes. “My first Smartphone was the i-phone, the
very first i-phone that came out. I’d just started college and Ilovedit. I was
one of those people that waited for it and got it the day it came out. I was
one ofthosegirls, “she says.

Hayes now has
accounts with Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr and Facebook which she updates several
times a day. "I don't keep a traditional sketchbook. I think of the
internet as my sketchbook," she has said. A boon for her thousands
of followers as she builds her brand; they can watch her creative process on a day to day basis.

Now, four years out of art school, where she
stayed awake during art history lectures, Hayes career has started to flourish.
Her paintings are combination of copied historical masterpieces and up to the
minute renderings of images from the internet. “I think of these works as master study, with commentary,"
she says.

Although she is
expanding her repertoire with multimedia applications and video works like her latest solo exhibition
at the 55 GansevoortStreet Gallery. This
American Life is a 30 minute looped, selfie-filled
videochronicle of
what she considers the year's
best moments captured on Instagram, Vine, and her own i-phone. And
if the trailer for
this short film is anything to go by the fast lane is the destination.

This American Life is on show at
55 Gansevoort Street until the 5th of January and like the internet
viewable 24/7.

Saturday, December 20, 2014

Where European artists of the 1930’s were fascinated by
African culture for the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam it was a lived experience.
With a Chinese father and a mother of mixed African and Spanish descent, Lam
grew up in rural Cuba where the influence of his God Mother, Matonica Wilson, a
locally renowned sorceress and healer was constant reminder of the culture that
surrounded him. In his 40’s, Lam reconnected with the roots of his childhood culture
by visiting Haiti to observe voodoo ceremonies which mitigated by his love of
African poetry were to influence his mature works.

After three years in Havana studying law and drawing the
plants at the botanical gardens, at the age of 21, Lam traveled to Spain. For
the next 14 years he studied the art of the Europeans and painted the Spanish
landscape. His Cuban slave heritage caused him to emphasize with the Spanish laborers
and prompted him to side with the Republicans during the Spanish civil war.

After the cessation of hostilities Lam moved to Paris. It
was there that he met Pablo Picasso; it was a meeting of like minds. About
which Lam said “Everybody felt this influence, for Picasso was the master of
our age. Even Picasso was influenced by Picasso! But when I first painted bulls
in Spain, I had not seen his bulls. And I had done my own paintings in a
synthetic style, in an attempt to simplify forms, before discovering his. Our
plastic interpretations simply coincided. I already knew the Spanish
temperament, for I had lived it, suffered it, in the country itself. Rather
than an influence, we might call it apervasion of the spirit. There was no
question of imitation, but Picasso may easily have been in my spirit, for
nothing in him was alien or strange to me. On the other hand, I derived all my
confidence in what I was doing from his approval.”

Three years later after a short sojourn with the surrealists
in Marseilles and Martinique Lam returned to Cuba. The exploitation of his home
country affected him deeply. Of which he said “I Decided that my painting would
never be the equivalent of that pseudo-Cuban music for nightclubs. I refused to
paint cha-cha-cha. I wanted with all my heart to paint the drama of my country,
but by thoroughly expressing the Negro spirit, the beauty of the plastic art of
the blacks. In this way I could act as a Trojan horse that would spew forth
hallucinating figures with the power to surprise, to disturb the dreams of the
exploiters.”

A decade later Lam returned to Europe, first to France and
then to Italy where he remained to the end of his days in 1982. Throughout this
time he kept a keen interest in the events of his homeland submitting works for
exhibition there in solidarity with his peoples aspirations.

Whilst the parallels between his work and that of the
European modernists are undeniable they come from a different place. Whereas
the Europeans have imposed a learned African aesthetic upon their European sensibilities,
Lam incorporates a learned European aesthetic within his African heritage.

Friday, December 19, 2014

In today’s media driven world
where both sides of an argument must be given oxygen the relevant validity of the
spin is often best explained through the visual exaggeration of their
proponents; a caricature of the spokesperson. Be it Tina Fey’s impersonation of
Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live or David Levine’s cartoon of President Lyndon
Johnson and his Vietnam scar they define their subject with greater clarity
than any argument could express.

For over 40 years David Levine’s
caricatures graced the pages of major American publications from the New York Review
of Books to The New York Times, from Time magazineto the Rolling Stone, from Esquire magazine to Playboy. Be they politician or judge, playwright or pope, artist or scientist all his subjects had their pretensions pricked by his devastating visual wit. And all were
presented without a caption. As he told Vanity Fair’s David Margolick,“If I
can’t do it the way Charlie Chaplin did it, words are not going to help.”

Born in Brooklyn into a left
leaning politically active family he considered himself a Communist; “a
beautiful idea” that the Soviet regime ruined. Convinced that power corrupts
his scorn for those in authority was nonpartisan. An attitude that caused art
critic Hilton Kramer to write in the New York Times about Levine’s 1968
exhibition of caricatures “They are wickedly intelligent and shamelessly
unfair.”

Whilst the commissioned
caricatures paid the bills, Levine’s first love was painting, depicting his
beloved Coney Island and the portraits of ordinary people. About which, art critic
Maureen Mullarkey has written “None of Levine’s hard-edged burlesques
prepare you for the sensuous satisfactions of his paintwork: the matte charm of
his oil handling and the virtuoso refinement of his watercolors. Caustic humor
gives way to unexpected gentleness in the paintings.”

The World He Saw, a mini retrospective of 38 paintings and 12 caricatures by Levine is on
view until the 17th of January at New York’s Forum Gallery.

Thursday, December 18, 2014

Paul Klee was a talented violinist with, it is said, a fondness
for the music of Bach and Mozart. He was also a natural draftsman as his school
books and early exhibitions of etchings attest. During his formative years he vacillated
between these two art forms but, fortunately for those of us with a passion for
the visual arts, music came second. Although he kept food on the table through
his musical gigs until his paintings started to sell in his thirties.

Considered one of the greatest colorists of the 20th
Century where his theories about music and color combine in improvisations which he likened to the
melody of the work, it was not always the case. He struggled with
color until he was 35 and visited Tunisia. About which he wrote “Color has taken possession of me; no
longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has hold of me forever. That
is the significance of this blessed moment. Color and I are one. I am a painter.”

Blessed with an
ironic sense of humor, often noticeable in his titles, Klee was man of his
times and as such has been associated withExpressionism, Cubism,Futurism,Surrealism and Abstraction.
His work, whilst influenced, stands independently apart.

It is reported
that Klee practiced the violin before painting and once in the studio would
work on several canvases simultaneously. And like a composer he notated his
drawings and paintings with a number and
date cataloging their sequence in time.

As the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilkewrote about Klee’s workin 1921, "Even if
you hadn’t told me he plays the violin, I would have guessed that on many
occasions his drawings were transcriptions of music." A thought picked up by the Guardian Newspaper's art critic Adrian Searle in 2013, "

One day he might be arranging a composition of fish and flowers and clocks, the next little colored rectangles that come and go with a wonderful musicality, and never quite settle down."

The first
Russian retrospective exhibition of his work Paul Klee: Not a day without a line is on show at Moscow’s Pushkin Sate Museum of Fine Arts
until the 1st of March. Whilst in Bern, Switzerland the Zentrum Paul Klee is showing the
exhibition Paul Klee: Special class – not
for sale until the 1st of February.

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

“Just as one can compose colors, or forms, so one can
compose motions.”

Alexander Calder

In 1922 off the coast of Guatemala whilst sailing between New York and San
Francisco Alexander Calder experienced a simultaneous sun rise and moon
set. About the experience he has said “I
saw the beginning of a fiery red sunrise on one side and the moon looking like
a silver coin on the other. Of the whole trip this impressed me most of all; it
left me with a lasting sensation of the solar system.”

It was a pivotal moment in the 24 year olds life, perhaps his
personal Road to Damascus, for he finally abandoned his career as a mechanical
engineer to follow in the footsteps of his parents. His mother was a
professional portrait painter and his father was a sculptor like his father
before him.

The following year Calder began classes at New York’s Art
Student League. He supported himself as an illustrator for the National Police Gazette
during this time. One of his assignments for the Gazette was to produce
illustrations of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

In 1926 Calder traveled to Paris and enrolled at Académie de la Grande
Chaumière. He also started his ongoing sculptural performance work Cirque Calder; articulated
wire and found object sculptures of circus performers whom Calder would
manipulate to perform for friends, associates and eventually the general public.
He adapted these skills into larger wire sculpture works; a drawing in space,
which he exhibited with some success on both sides of the Atlantic.

A 1930 visit to Piet Mondrian's studio had a lasting impression. About this visit Calder said “This
one visit gave me a shock that started things. Though I had heard the word
"modern" before, I did not consciously know or feel the term
"abstract. So now, at thirty-two, I wanted to paint and work in the
abstract. And for two weeks or so, I painted very modest abstractions. At the
end of this, I reverted to plastic work which was still abstract.”

A year later he exhibits his first “Mobile”, a name suggested
by Marcel
Duchamp upon his visit to Calder’s studio to see these mechanized abstract sculptures. Over the ensuing years Calder’s kinetic
sculptures have become the signature works for which he is best known.

A selection of these
works along with his “stabiles”, Calder’s often monumental simple forms executed in sheet
metal, can currently be seen at Salem’s Peabody Essex Museum. Organized by the Los Angeles
Community Museum of Art, Calder and Abstraction: From Avant-Garde to Iconic is
on show at the Peabody until the 4th of
January.

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Greek myth has it that when Pandora opened her box all the
troubles that beset the world flew out except for hope; the optimistic state of mind based on the expectation of
positive outcome. It is said to be the underlying attribute of the somber
and austere paintings of Canadian artist Jean Paul Lemieux’s almost minimalist rendered
landscapes with their often solitary figures that endears them to their
audience. And even when he painted groups of people they seem to be apart lost in
their own reverie.

Credited with the revitalization of Canadian landscape painting,
the softly spoken, gentle artist creates the quiet beauty of being human. In
1967 he said of his work “I have on theories. In my landscapes and my
characters I try to express the solitude we all have to live with, and each
painting, the inner world of my memories.”

Describing his working methods, his daughter, Anne Sophie, wrote “He liked to work alone,
steeped in a silence that allowed him to hear his inner voice and to construct
with brush and paint his inner world. This silence passed into his painting.”

Working during the
latter half of the 20th Century when abstraction had engulfed expressionism
Lemieux expression was one sympathetic to the relationship of an often harsh environment
with the people who inhabit it. Like the European expeditions into a new world
where the hope of a successful journey was the prerequisite of survival.

Lemieux’s works are
one of the highlights of the Eyes on Quebec
exhibition at Ontario’s McMichael
Canadian Art Collection which is on show until the 1st of
February.

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The expat

Henry Bateman is an artist and writer currently living in Australia, a return home after living in the Philippines for 10 years. The Ex Expat, is his blog about the arts (often) and politics (sometimes).
His writing has been published by Crikey.com (Australia), Artslant (US), The Expat Travel & Lifestyle Magazine & The Expat Newspaper (both in the Philippines) and The Western Review (Australia).
He has also had seven solo exhibitions and has had his work shown in 15 group exhibitions as well as 35 theater commissions as a set designer and/or lighting designer.